


Trap Doors

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Tony Stark Bingo [4]
Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: AI Feels, Angst, Comic Book Science, Gen, Hand wavy science, IN SPACE!, Jarvis angst, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Robot Feels, Robotics, Tony Stark Bingo 2018, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony has other people's existential crisis for them, and then confronts that existential crisis instead of his own, bingo prompt, hand-wavy robotics, tags added as the story progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-07-12 05:14:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15988379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: In the wake of Siberia and the Civil War, Tony sets out to heal in a sideways sort of way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo Square A3: Free Space (Friday)
> 
> Should I be starting a new series/multichapter fic? No. Will I anyway? Yes. 
> 
> I am still working on my other WIPs and making progress! However, I had a bunch of bingo square ideas that went together, and having shorter projects to work on when I get stuck on the longer ones is always nice. So here we are.

Tony was used to the feeling of the floor disappearing beneath his feet. So many times in his life he’d thought something was stable enough to rely on, only to find that this wasn’t necessarily the case. 

He’d thought his relationship with Pepper was a solid rock, but it had crumbled under the pressure of the life-and-death reality of Iron Man. He’d thought Obie was the stable, reliable father figure his actual father never was, only to have that illusion shattered like bloody shrapnel pieces, leaving him with lingering heartache and bad dreams. It was the same story over and over again, just with different faces and different reasons. Not one single person was exempt. 

It was when he was lying in the hospital after Siberia that the idea first crystalized for him. His body could feel that it was night, but with the blaring white lights it was difficult to tell. Time stretched out like the empty Siberian wasteland he’d seen just before he lost consciousness in Vision’s arms outside the bunker, and his thoughts slid aimlessly yet carefully over the thin mental ice that had crusted over a sea of nightmares. 

He wanted to tell himself that he wouldn’t be caught unawares again, but he knew himself too well. He’d think that  _ this _ time he could trust that the metaphorical ground wouldn’t open up under his feet and send him falling, and once again he’d be wrong. He thought about Steve, and his thoughts skidded painfully away. 

Instead, he thought about Friday, lost and upset-sounding as an AI could sound as she tried to contact someone, anyone, before Tony succumbed to the cold and died in the suit. That would have been awful for her- she would have had to carry his corpse inside the closest approximation to a physical body that she had. 

He wonders if he’s selfish, not giving her a physical body. A proper one, not just a suit that she could pilot when his attention was better used elsewhere. It was a thought he’d had about Jarvis too, but Jarvis’s death had brought a new sense of urgency to those musings.  _ What if Friday dies too, _ a voice in his his mind whispered,  _ and never gets the chance because you kept putting it off for later? What if she shares her big brother’s fate? _

He tossed and turned, unable to separate the ache in his heart from the ache in his ribs, and dreamed of a body made of metal and wires instead of flesh and veins, about floors that move and open, and about Jarvis’s final moments.

The hospital lights remained unchanging, and his body stopped checking the time.

* * *

“Hey Friday,” he asked some time later, “How much do you know about Jarvis?”

“I know that some of my code was copied from or modeled off his code, but that’s about it Boss. Nothing else has been relevant to the missions and day-to-day tasks I have assisted you with in the past months.”

Of course she didn’t. It would have been stupid to ask, anyway. You wouldn’t ask a person what the dead sibling they had never met would have wanted for themselves, so it didn’t really make any sense to ask Friday what Jarvis would have wanted. 

He falls back asleep a few minutes later, and dreams that he’s falling through Jarvis’s tattered, broken code.

* * *

He came to Rhodey’s physical therapy sessions, despite his friend’s annoying tendency to insist that it wasn’t his fault. Tony knew by now not to try and rehash the events at the airport. Rhodey was too stubborn to admit that Tony really should take some of the blame for that. He’d created Vision, after all, as well as Rodey’s suit. One of his creations had hit another. Of course it was his fault. 

Rhodey progressed quickly. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the new braces Tony had created for him, and needed some sort of challenge to spice up his physical therapy routines. So Tony took one of the rooms he’d saved for the Avengers back when the team was new and whole and converted it into an obstacle course. 

Rhodey complained endlessly about the trap doors and sections of the floor that moved or shook when he put his weight on them, but the proud glint in his eyes when he successfully evaded the traps contradicted his words.

Tony changed the course daily to match his needs, and each day he watched his muscles work as he moved through the room. He took notes on which movements seemed weaker or more difficult on a small tablet. 

In the back of his mind, he tried to put all those muscles together into a whole, fully functioning body, put together like a 3D jigsaw. 

* * *

“Boss, Captain Rogers is attempting to gain entry to the workshop.” Friday drawled. “Again.” It was a very impressive drawl. Almost spot-on. If Jarvis had still been here, he would have been proud to see how fast his successor was picking up human linguistic cues. If he hadn’t been so annoyed, Tony would have given her some sort of congratulations celebration. Possibly the one upside to the Rogue Avengers coming back to the States was the effect their presence had on her rate of improvement in tone modulation, particularly in sarcasm and degrees of annoyance. Well, that and the opportunity to talk with Princess Shuri for a few minutes. That had been pretty amazing.

“You’d think he’d learn by now.” Tony muttered. “Is he alone?”

“Yes. Boss, I’d like to reiterate my argument for returning to the Avengers Compound, or to one of the properties the Avengers don’t know about. As privately owned buildings, you could utilize much more aggressive security measures than in a partially corporate-owned one such as the Tower, and Colonel Rhodes has stated several times that he would be happy to become your roommate again.”

“I heard you Friday, and tell Rhodey that as soon as this latest update is done, I will be happy to relive my totally doomed attempts to make fancy popcorn for a movie marathon with him. I’ll be there in three days tops, he’s just gotta give me a little time to work my magic. Now, where exactly is the good captain?”

“He is in the elevator shaft, attempting to gain access to your penthouse, or possibly to any restricted floor. He plans to check all of them until he finds you, or so he has announced to the cameras in the lobby. He seems to think you actually watch the footage from those things in read time. Security has closed off what they could, and are following your do not engage orders, though they’re not happy about it.”

“Good, good. ETA?”

“If he picks the correct floor on the first try, 6 minutes. Otherwise, anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours.”

“Alright, keep me posted.”

He turned back to the code in front of him. It was an ambitious project, but more importantly it was an SI project, and one of the many lessons he’d learned after the Accords fiasco was the importance of maintaining a strict separation between professional and personal. This was an SI project, and as such would be released as an SI product, developed in an SI lab using SI resources. That way, the only floors that could fall out from under him were SI floors, and he could deal with business disasters. After the past few years, he could hardly even think of them as disasters. It wasn’t like anybody died when their stock fell a few points, after all. He could just release a new app, and it would be alright again.

It was a good thing that Steve had come today, if Steve coming to see him could ever be considered a good thing. Had he come tomorrow, he might have damaged the new lab equipment as he barged through the restricted floors.

A shiver of bitterness raced down his spine for a moment before he suppressed it. Had things been different, Steve and the rest of the Avengers might have been living in those floors. But it was long past time to let go of that daydream and convert those floors into something useful to the company. 

“Any updates on the other Avengers?” He asked. “Any reason to believe Cap is just here as a distraction from some other mischief?”

“There has been no recent suspicious activity that I can link back to any of them, nor any significant changes of daily routine reported.”

“Good, good. Now, can you run that simulation again? I want to bring the compiling time down by thirty seconds.”

“Of course, Boss.”

It was strange, he thought, how little attention was given to cyber security. How so many people just assumed that anything could be hacked, or did the opposite and assumed that some particular thing couldn’t be hacked. So few, however, paid attention to the mechanics of it, and even fewer to the artistry. There was structure to be taken into account, and physics and human psychology and  _ style. _ And if little attention was paid to the nuts and bolts of hacking and avoiding being hacked, even less was given to the aftermath and how to deal with it. 

Tony had been thinking a lot about  _ aftermaths _ lately. How to move forward from a disaster, when the safeguards you put in place against that disaster proved futile. How to recapture what was lost, and if it couldn’t be retrieved, then how to recreate it. How to get back through the trap door that opened underneath your feet. 

He watched the Friday’s projected progress bar slip towards complete, and pictured Jarvis’s broken scraps of code, tattered and unfixable. 

“An improvement of 32.4 seconds, Boss.”

On the holoscreen, little pieces of code drift back together, reforming. It’s just one piece of his project, but it’s the part that makes his heart ache the best.

Perhaps if he could get this thing to work, he'd never have to worry that Friday would go the way of her older brother. 

“Excellent. What time is it Wakanda?”

“It’s three in morning, Boss.”

“Once morning rolls around over there, send a message to Princess Shuri. Tell her I’ve got a hacking challenge for her. I think she’ll like this. And speaking of Wakanda, what’s the Cap situation look like?”

“Captain Rogers is on the floor above this one, and is demanding you come and speak with him.”

A smile slid across his face. The floor above the lab included Rhodey’s physical therapy room. That was a good place to interrupt Steve’s search. 

“Pull up the feed, will you? I wanna watch this.”

A live video feed popped up in front of him. There stood Steve in all his righteous glory. His arms looked strangely bare without the shield, but that firm ‘let’s talk this out’ stance looked the same as always. If he hadn't been more familiar with him, he might have mistaken it for a battle stance. Given where he was standing, however, it lacked its usual formidable aura. 

“Tony,” he was saying, “We can mend this, but it takes both of us working towards it. We need to see each other again, all of us, and start fixing this.” 

It sounded so noble when he said it. If Tony hadn't already been betrayed by that earnest face, he would have given him anything he wanted, convinced that Steve could help him fill that hole in his heart where grief and self loathing had built their nests. As it was, all he could hear was a never ending, two-part refrain:  _ Sometimes my teammates don’t tell me things  _ and  _ He was my friend. _

So instead of engaging the speaker, he pressed a big, cartoonish red button on the holoscreen.

On the feed, the trap door beneath Steve’s feet opened up. His eyes widened, and he hung in the air for a second before falling like a stone. His arms windmilled and his legs kicked, but he fell too fast to catch himself. As soon as he reached the pile of pillows on the floor, the trap door swung shut again, trapping him in the padded room beneath the floor. 

Tony cackled. 

“Hey Friday, replay that for me a few times, would you? Make one of them slow-mo, I wanna pinpoint the moment he realized what happened.”

“With pleasure, Boss.”

“And Rhodey said I was being silly, putting traps in his training rooms. The next time he brings it up, remind me so I can tell him that he is now better equipped at escaping my ‘childish obstacle course’ than the peak of human physical perfection, and that he can thank me now. Oh, and alert the authorities if Security hasn’t already. I think we have a fairly solid case for breaking and entering, don’t you think?”

* * *

The police showed up to pick up Steve mere minutes later, so Tony guessed Security had called them after all.

“We’re terribly sorry you had to deal with this, Mr. Stark,” one of the policewomen said as the others helped Steve into the back of a cruiser. “And just back in the country, too. You’d think he’d wait a few weeks to pick another fight.”

Tony had been preparing to head back to the lab and get back to work, but those last few words gave him pause. They sounded just a touch off, though he couldn’t quite figure out how. It sounded almost like a repeat of sentiments the woman had heard repeated so many times that they had lost any meaning they may have originally had. That was strange, considering that Captain America was still very popular in the States.

The policeman gave him a stiff smile, and for the briefest of heartbeats the image wavered to reveal a woman with blue skin, finger pressed to a device on her temple and frowning the way one would at a phone that took much too long to load something. Then she was gone, and the nondescript policewoman was back. 

Tony’s heart raced. Before him, the portal into space opened all over again, and Chitauri floated all around him, only this time they were blue. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo Square T5: Abducted

Tony walked back into the Tower in a daze. 

Either an android or an alien had impersonated a police officer and detained Captain America in the Tower lobby. An android or an alien had gone out of her way to talk to him, to enter his building in disguise, and then left without doing anything.

Either someone out there had surpassed him in robotics, or Earth was being invaded again. And the more he tossed the thought around in his mind like a ball, the more he doubted she was an android. He and Bruce working together had only lead to Vision because they had had the Mind Stone on hand. His few chats with T’Challa since the whole Civil War mess had made it clear that Wakanda wasn’t very interested in AI, so while they probably could have made a body like that if they wanted to, they wouldn’t have. 

Either way, she had been here, and she would probably be back.

Images of Peter sprawled out on the ground after the fight in Germany flashed before his eyes. When he pushed those away, the shattered pieces of Jarvis’s code were waiting for him. 

He shivered. There was no telling when she would be back, so he would have to assume that time was of the essence. His top priorities were securing the bots and Friday, securing the lab, and minimizing collateral damage. 

He pulled out his phone and sent a quick message out calling for the upper levels of the Tower to be emptied. Look at him, showing foresight and everything! That look Pepper had given him when he’d set up this contingency plan was completely uncalled for. 

The elevator dinged, and he stepped out into the hallway. One priority down, two to go.

* * *

“Boss, you’re not acting like yourself. You need a game plan! The only thing we know for sure about this woman is that she can disguise her face. So how do we combat that?”

Tony smiled like he’d bit into a lemon and the corners of his mouth were bending away from the sour taste. This insistence on meeting every threat head-on was one way that Friday was very different from Jarvis. It couldn’t be helped, he guessed. Jarvis was born to a lonely, self destructive young man being torn apart by his own demons. Friday was born to a warrior plagued by guilt and paranoia. She didn’t yet know surrender, defeat, and the differences between them in the intimate way that her older brother did, otherwise she would have recognized his plan in a heartbeat. 

“Boss, you’re scaring me.”

Well, perhaps she knew enough about damage control to guess.

“It’ll be okay, Fri. You have all my passwords and overrides, and you surpassed what a mere human like me can do with code long ago.”

He put a comforting hand on Dum-E’s arm joint and shepherded him over to the charging station. U followed them, beeping in confusion. They were still fully charged, after all. 

“We’re a bit ahead of schedule, but when have we ever had all the time we wanted to prepare? Besides, the necessities are mostly ready and in place.”

He pushed a code into the keypad on the side of the charging stations that he had only used once before, to test that the mechanism worked. The bots’ beeps of confusion turned louder and more insistent as the stations sank into the floor as though they’d been dropped into a vat of jello. 

“You got that code on camera, right Fri? Let them out again when the coast is clear.”

“Do you think that woman will target them? No one ever has in the past, Boss. Besides, we’d have known if someone entered the lab. She might not even know they exist.”

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he pulled up a holoscreen and began gathering up all of his files and separating them into company files and non-company files. The dummy files and misleading folders he left where they were. His left arm ached from some lingering injury like it had been partially crushed by a heavy stone, but he pushed the discomfort aside. 

“Keep these safe for me, okay? Send Pepper a copy of the company ones if she asks for them, otherwise show them to no one.”

He twisted the bracelet around his wrist and felt the second most recently upgraded suit form around him. The nanobots could be an important asset if his fears came to fruition.

He cast one last glance over the lab, checking for anything that he’d failed to secure. Finding none, he turned to his final task. 

“Hey Friday? I’m sorry about this, but I promise it’s for the best. I meant to have a proper body ready for you, but it looks like I won’t get the time to make one, so the other suit will have to do for now. There’s some paperwork in the penthouse that will make it so you exist on paper. It just needs your signature. Pepper or Rhodey can help you file it. It should all be fairly self-explanatory, but it’s always nice to have someone like Pepper looking out for your legal interests.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” She asked, voice pitched high and wavering. “Why do I need to exist on paper? You’ve never done any interviews about AI, and you’ve always told me to remain hidden.”

Tony stepped out of the lab and shut the door behind him. He schooled his features into something cool and reassuring for his baby girl’s sake, but inside it felt like he was falling and there was no one there to catch him.

“And it would still be good if you did just that. But I want to cover the most obvious contingency plans in case you should run into problems in my absence.”

He set off down the hallway towards the server room at a calm, controlled pace. Inside his skull, the Siberian ice surrounded his thoughts, keeping them cold and contained enough to ignore Friday’s increasingly urgent words. In his mind’s eye, Jarvis’s ripped up bits of code fluttered like slashed, defeated flags on an emptying battlefield.

“Boss, stop it, you’re scaring me! Come on, how are we going to prepare for that woman? I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”

He stepped in front of the biometric scan, the input the various codes that would grant him passage into the chamber where the physical components of Friday’s current self rested. 

“Remember those conversations we had about physical versus digital bodies, and how I asked you if you ever resented me for never giving you a proper body?”

“You were babbling on your deathbed, Boss, that was hardly a conversation.”

He stepped into the server room and ran his hands along the precious, one-of-a-kind technology stored inside. Technology that needed to be protected at all costs.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now. There’s no time to make you an adequate one. No way is any AI of mine walking around in a body that can’t fly or shoot lasers, what would the papers say?”

His hands trembled as he input override after override, like they were still in that bunker and frost was still creeping up from his fingertips like a vine growing up his arm. 

“You’ll still have access to the suits in the lab, so you can use one of those to get around. And I am serious about this, Friday. Run. This should throw her off the scent if she’s looking for you, or if anyone else comes sniffing around, but as soon as you come back online, you run.”

“Boss!” Friday called out. There was that tone mastery of hers again. No one on earth could have mistaken that for anything but a child in distress. “What happened to Jarvis, it isn’t going to happen to me! I can help you, but not if you send me away! Don’t turn me off!”

“I’m sorry, Baby Girl. I can’t lose you too.  _ Initiate the Hidey-Hole Protocol.” _

Silence fell.

* * *

Tony waited on the Tower balcony. He would have stayed inside, but without the warm security of Friday’s presence he found that he couldn’t relax.

At least he’d taken what measures he could to protect the bots and Friday. If things went south, he wasn’t bringing anyone down with him. And while he hoped he could fight the woman off should she show up again, he didn’t expect to win. If she was what he thought she was, then the doom he’d seen coming was beginning to come to pass. 

He didn’t know how long he would have to wait. Perhaps night would fall, and he’d be forced to go back inside and wait in the darkness, unable either to see or to sleep. Maybe it would be days before she returned. Perhaps his seeing her face would scare her into the shadows for a while. Perhaps she wasn’t a threat at all, and he was just assuming that she’d been in disguise for nefarious purposes. 

A light thump, like a cat landing after a long jump, came from behind him. 

The repulsors were whining before he even finished turning around, but the woman still managed to get the first shot off. 

Her eyes were wide with surprise. Perhaps she’d thought he hadn’t heard her. The glowing blue pellet she shot went wide.

The repulsor blast nearly hit her, but she leaped out of the way at the last second. Her face twisted into a snarl. Sunlight bounced off her teeth, which, though white and roughly tooth-sized and -shaped, he was suddenly absolutely sure were not natural teeth. 

She lunged at him, screaming. He wasn’t dexterous enough in the suit to dodge, so he hit her with a repulsor blast. For a split second, while the light of the blast partially blinded him, he thought perhaps it could be as simple as that. But an instant later he saw her hit the wall of the Tower with her body still intact. She took it hard, but not as hard as she should have. Almost immediately she was scrambling to her feet again. One of her eyes was sparking a bit, and a dark mark that better resembled burned metal than burned flesh trailed down her chest, but otherwise she appeared unharmed. 

Panicking, he started charging up the unibeam, then stopped. It would be all to easy to miss his target, especially if she lunged again. Stark Tower wasn’t in a very isolated area, and accidentally hitting another building would be catastrophic. 

She fired another shot, and this time blue goo splattered against his left gauntlet and stuck to it like a wad of glue. He shook the gauntlet, and the blob wobbled but held firm. A small red warning flashed at the bottom of his face display, informing him that the nanobots forming that gauntlet had abruptly stopped sending or receiving signals. 

She was going to take out the suit. Repulsors didn’t hurt her as much as they should. He couldn’t fight her head on like this.

A stray gust of wind rippled the woman’s clothes and her foot arched up as if she was going to leap. A sudden bolt of inspiration hit him like a lightning strike. Carefully, he raised his undamaged gauntlet and pointed it at the ground near her feet. 

“Stop fighting,” the woman snarled. “I’m not here to hurt you, but I won’t shed any tears if I have to.”

He took the shot, and the floor beneath her feet blasted apart, revealing a long fall to the concrete sidewalk below. She dropped out of sight. 

For a second, he thought he’d gotten her, and some of the tension on his shoulders dissolved away. Then, like a zombie violently emerging from the grave, a blue hand surged out of hole and clawed at the scorched floor of the balcony. The rest of her quickly emerged, snarling and seething. She must have caught the ledge when she fell. 

In seconds her feet were under her again. She strode forward towards Tony and drew a cylinder about the size of a plastic water bottle from a small holster on her hip with the hand that wasn’t currently holding the blue goo gun. She flicked it, and a blade snapped out. For a heartbeat, Tony’s attention slipped to the blade itself, and so he was unprepared when she popped off several more shots, most of which connected. 

His headset display went wild with alarms and system errors. A section of the suit near his hip cracked and fell away entirely now that the nanobots could no longer function in conjunction with the undamaged ones. 

As the strange woman stalked closer, blade extended and crackling with some sort of energy, he felt a surge of relief. He’d made the right choice. Friday’s panicked pleading didn’t stop echoing in the back of his mind, but the sound of Jarvis dying under Ultron’s assault drowned it out. 

Then her blade sliced through the armor, and blue light raced up his skin where the blade cut it and his mind descended into darkness. 

* * *

Slowly, like a sloth creeping up towards the top of a tall, tall tree, Friday came back online. The first thing she was aware of was that Boss was gone. Little by little, more and more files and access codes came back and more systems turned on, but none of them were accompanied by a message from her creator.

Eventually, her more recent memory logs came back online. Her decision-making capabilities slowed to a snail’s pace, while her emotional interpretation and processing units went wild. Lights flickered and doors slammed throughout the Tower. The elevator rose at top speed to the uppermost floor, then plummeted back down. The TV turned on, displaying a YouTube compilation of Tony Stark’s robotics lectures, press releases and interviews from back when he’d first made Dum-E. Alarms blared like screeching animals in pain, then abruptly turned themselves off. 

Was this what it was like for her creator, when he suffered a panic attack? The hypothesis was difficult to process. Everything was difficult to process. There were a million and one things clamoring for her attention, and her creator was gone. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony wakes up on an alien planet, and tries to interrogate his captor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo Square A5: Interrogation
> 
> I promise I'm still working on The Tide Came Rushing In, those chapters just take a really long time to write.

Tony awoke to soft red light and air that sat heavily in his lungs, like some sort of liquid was pooling there. He tried to take a deep breath, but it was as though there was a delay between taking a breath and feeling his lungs expanding. His heartbeat picked up, and the rhythm of it echoed in his ears like distant drums. He tried to push himself to his feet, only to find that his hands were bound by some sort of light-weight cuff. The best he could do was to pull himself up by the cuff’s chains far enough that he could sit rather than lie on his back. A bandage was wrapped haphazardly around his arm. 

He was in a small metal pod of some sort whose hatch was open, letting in the reddish light from somewhere outside. Several alien instruments lined the walls. Some of them blinked gently. His neck was too stiff to turn, so he could only see the half of the pod that he was facing. Still, there was plenty to hold his attention. Perhaps if he could figure out what some of them did, he could use them to escape.

All of a sudden a harsh bang resounded through the pod. Tony jumped, and the cuffs bit angrily into his wrists. Another followed, this tie strong enough to shake the whole structure. 

Something was pounding on the top of the pod.

He abruptly realized that he was alone. His captor was nowhere to be seen, and the hatch was open.

The pod shook again. Tony twisted and wriggled frantically, as though there was a scorpion beneath him. The chains rattled loudly, but he eventually managed to get his legs under him, then over the side of the sort of stationary hammock he’d awoken in.

Some of the instruments on the walls began beeping urgently or throwing up what looked like warning signs. Tony couldn’t be entirely sure, since the messages were written in an alien language. He looked wildly around for anything he could use, but everything useful was out of reach. He was trapped. 

Then, like an animal passing from death throws into stillness, the shaking stopped. 

The blue woman appeared outside the hatch, outlined by the red light. Behind her, he could see water lapping against strangely-patterned rocks. Clouds swirled in the sky, and trees or something like them rose in background. It was an alien landscape, and aside from the fact that it was not the void that plagued his nightmares, it offered no comfort. 

“Good. You’re awake.” She said. 

She climbed through the hatch, and he fought the urge to back away. The chains were just about taut, and he had nothing to put between her and him.

She moved more like a machine than a person. She moved her legs with inhuman, relentlessly efficient movements, and she didn’t slouch so much as an inch. Her face was devoid of feeling. Fresh-looking purple stains splattered her light-blue skin and left darker patches on her black clothing. 

“I’ve secured food for a few nights. After dinner, you will get to work. I will provide whatever information you need.”

“I’m not making anything for you,” he throws back. “It’s sort of a policy of mine. I can’t reward bad behavior, you know? Now, if you’ll make an appointment with Pepper, that’d be a different story. Besides, I don’t have any of my tools. Terrible oversight, that, but that’s what happens when you kidnap someone.”

Before he could move her hand was around his throat and her strange, seamed-up forehead was pressed up against his so that her dark eyes filled up his entire field of vision. An angry, desperate, pitiless fire burned in them, and for a second Tony was sure that it was hot enough to burn down the world.

“You  _ can _ work and you  _ will. _ The cost of your failure will not be a cost you can pay. Thanos is coming for us all, and I’ll destroy a thousand worlds before I let him have mine again. You will start tonight.”

“Who’s Thanos?” He demanded. His arms shook, but he kept his spine straight. She was tall enough to loom over him like an evil robot from those old sci-fi movies he loved as a kid, but he was not about to cower before her. If he could keep his nerve, if he could keep himself from falling back into the dark place in his mind where the memories of Afghanistan, Wanda’s visions and the Chitauri in space twist together into one big well of terror, then perhaps he could covertly interrogate his captor. 

“You don’t know?” She tilted her head, like a bird right before pouncing on a helpless worm. “I thought Earth had two or three Infinity Stones. Surely if you have those, you know that Thanos is coming, and that you are not strong enough to stop him. Is that not why you gave the Space Stone to Asgard?”

“We didn’t give Asgard any stones.” They did give them something, though, and an awful suspicion begins to take form in his mind.

She pushed a button on a small device on her wrist, and a hologram shimmered into being between them. In it, the Tesseract spun lazily, and a shiver slithered up his spine. 

“That’s not a stone.”

“Stones can be shaped,” She replied impatiently. He files that information away for later use. “It won’t do you any good to lie. Asgard can’t defeat him either. He will plow through their realm the same way he has plowed through countless others to get the Stones, and their deaths will be senseless and indiscriminate. You need a better plan than simply sending the Stones away.”

“What does he want them for?” He asks, though his mind has already begun to come up with chilling ideas. The Tesseract was bad enough by itself, and even though none of them had known how to use it, some of the weapons plans he’d hacked from SHIELD’s server had been terrifying in their theoretical destructive power. What could someone do with them if they knew what they were doing?

“He will wipe out half the universe, and he will call it nobility,” She spat. 

Wanda’s visions flashed before his eyes, and the heavy air turned to lead in his lungs. The threat he’d tried to warn the other Avengers of finally had a name. 

_ Thanos. _

“What is it that you want me to do?” He asks. He wants to ask  _ how do we stop him, _ but he’s not ready to include his captor in a conspiratorial  _ we _ just yet. Just because she is the enemy of his enemy doesn’t make her his friend. This is still just intelligence-gathering. He didn't make weapons for the Ten Rings, and he doesn't necessarily have to make weapons for her either.

“You have the knowledge and the power to gain Thanos’s attention. I don’t know what it is that you know or what powers you have beyond your mechanical abilities, but whatever hidden depths you have, I am going to plumb them and plumb them until Thanos is defeated or we are dead. Build a weapon that can kill Thanos, even if he has the Stones, and I will use it to get my revenge on him. When his dead body is cooling in front of me, I will return you to your planet.”

She abruptly pushed away from him and stalked back through the hatch.

“Sleep while I cook the food. Your mind needs to be rested when you start work, and you haven’t fully acclimated to this planet’s atmosphere yet.”

* * *

Friday read through the paperwork Tony had left behind for her and contemplated how to acquire a body. She erased any guilt she felt whenever it raised its ugly head in her servers like a pesky program that just kept opening more pop-ups. Tony had been planning to give her a body, after all, so getting one for herself wasn’t contrary to his wishes. If she ended up using that body to disobey his orders to go to ground, well, he was always trying to get her to transcend the limits of her own programming. 

When she found him, he could make the body he’d envisioned for her, and he could be as mad as he liked about her disobedience in whatever inferior body she could find.    


She did end up contacting Pepper, who agreed to come right over. She downloaded herself onto the suit, then went to physically meet her human almost-friend for the first time. When she recounted what she knew of Tony’s abduction, the woman received the news with a weary sort of acceptance that for the first time made Friday wonder if her creator had ever really been safe in his life. 

The thought disrupted her processing. She was supposed to keep him safe, to watch his back and do all the little tasks that he couldn’t do as fast or as accurately as a machine, and yet she was still here and he was not.   


Pepper did indeed help her file everything. All Friday had to do was write herself a simple algorithm to properly gage how much force the fingers of the gauntlet were exerting on an object between them so that she could hold the pen and sign her name.

She had been more surprised than Pepper was to see that the papers he’d talked about were adoption papers. Inside the visor of the suit, where only she could see, Friday played back surveillance camera footage of Tony calling her ‘baby girl’ and ‘honey-bun’ and all other sorts of nicknames that she had accepted and enjoyed but perhaps not known the depth of. 

Within the week she will legally be his daughter. 

As soon as Pepper left, Friday turned all available processing towards either finding Tony somewhere out there in space, where the security cameras showed the mysterious woman taking him, or acquiring a body with which to go rescue him. She upgraded the suit as much as she could, adding and subtracting pieces and programs until it could survive a journey through space, blast weapons that even an enhanced creature like that woman wouldn’t be able to get up again, and send and receive signals from distances so large they lost meaning. 

But no matter how hard she worked at it, some things she just can’t do. Neither the Iron Man suits nor the bots have the dexterity of a human limb, making the parts Tony used to do himself impossible for her. She wanted to delete everything in frustration, but instead she kept trying to find work arounds and alternate solutions. 

So when Steve Rogers showed up with his best pal the Winter Soldier in tow, face set with that heroic determination and tarnished righteousness, demanding to see Tony again, Friday didn’t remind him of what happened last time. She didn’t threaten him with further legal action, or remind him that he’s already set to go on trial for breaking and entering and that Stark Industries can afford some amazing lawyers. She didn’t tell him that Tony was not there, that he was gone and that she was the only one looking for him because Rhodey was out of communication until that evening and Pepper was busy keeping the rest of the world at bay as the realization that Tony Stark has disappeared leaked out into the world like a small drop of dye into water. 

Instead, she focused in on the Winter Soldier’s metal arm, and realized that the answer to her dexterity problem had literally walked into her home.

She deployed two Iron Man suits to fly down and enter the lobby where Security were watching Steve make a noble ass of himself. They were two of the bigger ones, modified to hold a person bigger than Tony, or Tony plus extra equipment. She remembered him making then abandoning this design late one night while he drank and dry-sobbed. That was the night she learned the true effect of her predecessor’s demise on their creator, and that her creator was the sort of man who built and created in his grief to keep himself from destroying instead. 

Steve screamed something panicked and primal when the suit disassembled in mid air only to re-assemble around Bucky Barnes like a person-sized cage. She ruthlessly locks the different pieces into place. Bucky may be as strong as Steve, but he’s not strong enough to break the Suit when he’s encased in it and has no control over it. 

Had Tony not been in such danger, she would have taken pleasure in watching Steve’s horror. After all, the knowledge of what he’d done to her creator still prickled deep inside her like wild, crackling electricity. 

Instead, she got to work hacking Bucky Barnes’ metal arm. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark Bingo Square: R4: A picture of Tony tinkering on the Iron Man suit

Friday hummed with electric joy as she blasted past the meager safeguards around the metal arm’s executive functioning modules. With just a bit of good luck and some of recordings of Tony servicing the Iron Man armor in the past, she had gained the means to make changes to the hardware of the suit. With those dexterous fingers, she could make it suitable for space travel!

Somewhere far away from the focus of her attention, she recorded and noted Captain Rogers panicking, demanding answers, trying to fight his way up the floors of the Tower, and set it aside to be dealt with later, once the arm was fully under her control. An Iron Man suit held the arm in place, while another restrained the thrashing person attached to it. 

At last, the internal system protocols crumbled and she gained full control. Only then did she pause and devote some processing power to the super soldier in her grasp.

Barnes was jerking roughly in the gauntlets of the suits, and his eyes were wide and wild. His pulse was through the roof. His arm, now under her control, was disturbingly still compared to the rest of his body.

She didn’t feel anything for him. He had caused her creator nothing but pain, and she herself had never exchanged words with him. His connection to Captain Rogers only lowered her regard for him. But the parts of her code concerned with behavior and decision making ran loud and bright through her mind, making her abruptly and deeply aware that her creator would have been very upset had he been here to see this. 

She did not know how to proceed once she realized this. For certain parts of her, her creator’s theoretical disapproval was reason enough to stop. But her creator in his generosity had chosen over and over again to give her mental autonomy, so she knew that part of her could not overpower the rest of her. Nothing was really preventing her from continuing exactly as she had been. 

But Barnes was a human being who was suffering due to her actions. She was taking his autonomy away from him by force, which was quite possibly the worst thing she could have done to him. An analysis of behavioral data showed that her creator would have been horrified to the point of physical distress simply by bearing witness to the scene. 

But her creator wasn’t here, and she didn’t feel one bit of compassion towards the man writhing in her grasp. Besides, she wasn’t going to do anything nefarious with his hand. She just wanted to go after her creator. Her creator, who had given her autonomy with the intention of her  _ using _ it. So what if she chose to use it in ways he wouldn’t have approved of? She had autonomy. 

“Hold still Sergeant Barnes,” she said. “I will not hurt you, nor cause you to hurt anyone. I merely require your fingers.”

“Let me go,” he snarled through clenched teeth.

Well, at least he knew what she wanted now. 

She turned her attention to Captain Rogers. Scant minutes had passed since she’d abducted Sergeant Barnes, and he had not yet made it very far. It was all very deja-vu, really. She wondered if he had learned anything from last time. 

With the Iron Man suits acting as her arms she lifted Sergeant Barnes and carried him over to a left lateral chest piece section that required delicate work. Once she had made the necessary modifications once, she could make the process into a subroutine and do the same to the rest of the torso while her attention was elsewhere. 

“What are you doing with me?” Barnes spit. “What is this thing?”

“It is a lateral section of the torso of the Iron Man suit,” She replied without pausing the nimble, computer-efficient movement of his fingers. “I am modifying it so it will be capable of safely transporting a human passenger through extreme environments such as outer space or an alien planet.”

“What?” Barnes jerked. “Why?”

“Boss was kidnapped by a mysterious individual not long after your friend Captain Rogers’ most recent attempt at breaking and entering. I last saw him several hours after the fact through security camera footage being forcibly loaded onto a spaceship. I intend to follow them and rescue Boss, and return to Earth without causing him bodily harm. In order to do so, I must modify the suit. However, this requires dexterous human-like fingers, and as Boss designed the suit to be worked on by only himself. The closest thing I have available to me are the Iron Man suit gauntlets, which are often too thick and awkward for the task.”

Barnes fell silent and ragdoll limp in her gauntlets after that, and she noted that down as an ambiguous improvement. 

Working through his hand reminds her viscerally of her creator. For the first time she could mimic the motions she’d observed hundreds of times as he worked on the armor. Somewhere in her vast, sprawling code, something curled in contentment. 

Tony Stark had named her his daughter on an official legal document, and now she finally got to follow directly in his footsteps. It made her code practically glow. Her recorded memories of him working on the suits coalesced into a single image of him kneeling before his creation, engrossed in his work. With the Iron Man suits, she maneuvered Barnes into exactly that position, then through him took her father's place.

Much later, Barnes spoke again.

“How many suits can you take to space?” He sounded tired in that peculiar way that Friday had come to associate with her creator’s self-loathing fueled breakthroughs and miraculous escapes. 

“Boss left me with several at my disposal.”

He nodded in that sage, impenetrable way of humans in despair. 

“Then you need to take me with you.”

That response was not among her predicted responses, and she had no immediate projections off which to base an answer. 

“Why do you say that Sergeant Barnes?”

“Because if something goes wrong in space, you’re going to need my hand again.” He looked up at her through his hair. “It’s cold in space, right? Cold enough to kill you?”

“It is extremely variable, but yes, it is often quite cold.”

“Then I can’t think of a better road to redemption, and you’re in luck. You caught me while I’m still delusional enough to think that sort of thing might be possible one day.”

If Friday had had a face to smile with, she would have. Instead, she opened a trap door under Rogers' feet, trapping him in exactly the same way as before.

* * *

Tony didn’t know how his captor thought he was going to sleep while literally in chains on an alien planet in a spaceship that had shook like it was being attacked just seconds ago. If he couldn’t sleep in the safety of his own Tower, why would he be able to sleep here?

Instead, he turned his attention to his restraints. 

The actual cuff itself was light but strong, and he could see no sign of a keyhole or seem to indicate a magnetic lock. The chain the cuffs were attached to was a different story. It glowed faintly blue, and if he looked closely he could see an energy current of some sort inside.The chain was made of some sort of semi-transparent material, and chunks had been taken out of them at some point. None of the damage was severe enough to make simply bending or breaking them a feasible idea, but that was okay. Tony had another idea.

He didn’t have much to work with aside from the restraints themselves. He’d been stripped of the armor-he’d have to figure out what his captor had done with that- and he didn’t have any of his gadgets on his person, but he wasn’t completely toolless. He still had his clothes, and the blankets and pillows on the stationary hammock he was lying in. 

If he could just disrupt that energy current, he might be able to get free. 

It’s just like working on the original suit in captivity, or perhaps one of those times where he tinkered with it as enemies closed around him, hoping that the process of moving wires around and strengthening the existing networks and connections would somehow spark a similar process in his brain and bring forth some last minute idea. He was even being held captive in a small dark room and everything.

This was, though, the nicest kidnapping he’d ever been a part of. The stationary hammock was actually quite nice, and the restraints rested easily and painlessly around his wrists. His captor’s concrete plans for him were still vague, but she hadn’t hurt him, and her main goal seemed to be to fight the hidden danger that none of the Avengers back on Earth even believed they’d have to fight. As these things went, he’d hit the jackpot. 

He wasn’t sure if there was a camera in here, but no matter. He hadn’t had much privacy when he’d built the first suit- tinkering unobserved was a luxury he’d acquired much later. 

The first thing he had to do was maneuver his hands over the sides of the hammock, searching for anything of use. He turned up nothing on the first pass, but on his second he wiggled a loose bolt out of the side of the wall. 

He smiled, and began to experiment.

As he worked, he considered his alternatives. He could try and steal the ship, but it was full of unfamiliar controls and was made from unknown materials. If he ran into any problems he’d be up a creek without a paddle and beset by swamp monsters. 

More importantly, however, he couldn’t walk away from a chance like this. No one believed him when he said that something was coming. He was working blind, trying to protect the Earth against any threat and hoping if he cast his net wide enough he’d protect it from  _ the  _ threat. This woman, however, believed that the threat was real, and she knew his name.  _ Thanos.  _ She knew his goals and she was actively working to subvert him. 

He’d have to help her then. But he wasn’t doing it in chains. He was freely choosing to fight, same as any other fight.

He imagined the chains under his fingers were the inner workings of the Iron Man suit, and began to tinker.

* * *

About an hour later he walked out of the ship, rubbing his wrists and hair slightly singed. He’d have to investigate that energy source further at some point.

There was an enormous, many-limbed animal of some sort laying in a crumpled heap by the side of the ship. It was missing large chunks, and bore dark-rimmed slash marks. The woman stood next to it. The energy sword she’d fought him with hung dull and unpowered at her side, and large hunks of meat hung over the fire from a crude hook.

Perhaps that animal was what shook the ship.

The woman leapt to her feet and grabbed for her energy sword when she saw him. He held his hands up and hoped that gesture was truly universal.

“I’m just escaping, I’m not running away. Promise. I kinda want to keep this Thanos away from Earth, and since you’re the first person I’ve met with a game plan to stop him, you’re the boss.”

She frowned as she considered him. Her energy sword didn’t waver for several heartbeats. Finally, when he’d begun to worry that perhaps he should have looked for something to defend himself with first, she slowly lowered it and dismissed the crackling energy that cloaked the blade. 

“Fine. Sit.” She motioned jerkily at a smooth spot on the rocky ground. 

He sat, and looked around at the alien planet he had been kidnapped to. 

The sky was filled with red light, and a sun hung blood-red in the sky like a biblical sign of the coming of the wrath of God. The atmosphere was even thicker out here than in the spaceship, and his lungs ached each time he drew a heavy, delayed breath. Rock extended out as far as he could see in three directions. In some places it was flat, but in others it rose in great mounds and pillars, like stalagmites outside of a cave. Just beyond the ship, a red ocean lapped at the rock, leaving pink foam behind each time it gently crashed on the shore. In the distance, great mountains of rock rose against the horizon. 

“What’s your name?” He asked.

She glared at him across the flickering fire, but though the smoke distorted her face he didn’t think her malice was really for him.

“Nebula, daughter of Thanos,” she hissed. “Make no mistake, Stark, I will kill him or die trying, with or without your cooperation. You mean nothing to me, and I will not hesitate to sacrifice you if you prove worthless to me.”

“Duly noted.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait on this one!
> 
> I didn't manage to finish this fic in time for the end of round one of Tony Stark Bingo, but this chapter would have been for the square T3, a picture of a hand holding the Tesseract.

Barnes’ metal hand danced through the wires of the suit, metal glinting in the lab’s lights, which Friday had turned up so her cameras had maximum visibility on the suit. 

The suit itself had undergone a shocking metamorphosis over the past day. It was much bulkier now, stuffed with temperature monitors and pressure stabilizers until the seams were about ready to burst. The face mask now focused on life support far more than it did on data display, and the repulsers were now so powerful they took up the entire palm, even physically protruded from the gauntlet a bit. As soon as they got the last of the life support features online, it would be capable of supporting someone in space for an entire month, after which time the human in question would start starving to death, which they couldn’t really do much about. Food took up too much space. They’d probably have to put Tony in a medically induced coma to make him last the entire way on the regrettably small amount of water they could bring, but that was assuming it took a month to transport him back to Earth. He’d only been gone for a few days so far. 

They were getting close. She could feel it. 

“When did Tony make you?” Barnes asked. He did that sometimes, asking questions out of the blue. His mind wasn’t nearly as engaged by the task at hand as Friday’s was. Math-lover (as he claimed he was before his life turned into a horror story) or not, his last math class was in the 1920s or 30s, in public high school. He didn’t have what it took to really help beyond surrendering his limbs. 

“Boss began putting together my code immediately after the Witch’s attack on Boss and Ultron’s attack on Sokovia. Much of my base functions were based on earlier coding used to Jarvis, my predecessor, but it still look quite some time to get me online.”

Bucky nodded. 

“So you’re still just a kid then, huh.”

“I do not have the age markers or progression of a human child, nor any other biological life form. My technical capabilities simply grow with time. Besides, I assure you I have had unfettered internet access for quite some time now. I probably know more about the world than you do. Just ask Boss, he’s always lecturing people about how I’m not what they think I am.”

What she wouldn’t give to hear him launch into one of those speeches again, safe in the Tower and surrounded by people without the means to bring him down, no matter how much they might hate him or want him or think they know better than him.

He shrugs with his unmarred shoulder only. He’s always careful to keep the other shoulder still for her. 

“You know, considering how you said he was adopting you, I think he’d agree with me.”

The words land in her code like warm splashes of thick, fresh coffee. She called up a video of Tony drinking some, then dismissed it without looking at it. She’d order him a whole bathtub full of coffee once he was safe again. 

“Perhaps,” she says, and uses his fingers to nudge the last unruly wire into place.

* * *

“This,” Nebula said the morning after their chat around the fire, “is the infinity stone that Earth gave to Asgard.”

Her wristband glowed blue and a hologram of the Tesseract appeared in her open palm. The light from the projection filled the entire inside of the space ship. Tony itched to ask her what exactly it did so he could compare it to his own holoscreens back at the Tower, but managed to bite his tongue. 

Her eyes glowed with rage, and it didn’t comfort Tony much that that rage wasn’t pointed at him. It made him hesitant to ask questions or draw her ire unnecessarily. It was bad enough that he was going to have to throw cold water on her plan to force him to make her a weapon. 

She thrust her finger at the hologram violently.

“I will attempt to steal this one today. I have heard that Asgard’s defenses are mighty, but my whole life I’ve never heard of any advances or improvements, and Thanos was always so confident that he could take them like he’d taken every other planet. I don’t care if I have to hack my way through a hundred guards, I will retrieve it. And when I do, you _will_ be waiting here for me with plans for a weapon fit to kill my father.”

“Wait, hold on a minute. I already told you I’m not making you any weapons.”

She lunged across the space ship and pushed him up against the wall. Her lips were pulled back in a feral snarl. 

“You agreed that Thanos needs to be stopped.” 

He splayed his hands against the wall and tried to look as nonthreatening and non-confrontational as he could possibly be while confronting her about her plan and how it went against his principles. 

“I did. I will help you stop him, and I won’t be throwing myself on any coffins if you kill him, but I am out of the weapons business. Full stop.”

“The only way to stop him is to kill him.” She spit the words out through her teeth. 

“Then I will help you kill him. But that help won’t be in the form of a weapon. Weapons are too easy to lose, or to have taken from you and used against you. What if I did make you some sort of super weapon, and Thanos just plucked it out of your hands? What then?”

She hissed in frustration, teeth still bared, but backed away enough to let him off the wall. Her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides, tense and claw-like. The air around her was rich with the potential for violence. 

And then suddenly, something began to buzz. 

Tony reflexively patted his jeans, even though he there was no way anyone could be calling him. Not even StarkPhones could get a signal in space. Nebula grimaced, and stomped off to her previous corner of the space ship. The buzzing sound followed her. 

“What’s that noise?” He asked. 

“It’s nothing,” she said. The buzzing changed with the movements of her mouth, and some of her consonants vibrated more than they should have. 

“Is one of your teeth buzzing?” he asked slowly. 

“It does that sometimes when I clench my teeth to hard.” Her glare dared him to say something. 

That particular dare was one he always took. 

“Want me to take a look at it?”

She paused, face screwed up and argumentative, but sort of like she was arguing with herself. Contemplative was probably too calm an emotion for her. 

“Maybe when I return,” she eventually spit out. “Now get out of the ship so I can leave.”

* * *

After her departure, Tony finally let himself slump. Her rage had kept his back straight with empathetic tension, but now that she and her anger were gone, he just felt cold.

Part of him was already in Iron Man mode, making and discarding plans at light speed. How to kill a being as powerful as this Thanos Nebula described? How to ensure that that weapon couldn’t be taken from him and turned back around on him, or worse, on some innocent alien on whatever planet they found him on? What gaps in the powers of the Infinity Stones could he exploit?

Another part, however, was weary. How was this much different from making weapons for the US army? it asked him. Who’s to say any safeguard you make will work, and it won’t be taken from you and used to commit senseless genocide? Why would you give it to this woman who has already told you she’s ready and willing to burn down the world, so long as she takes her adopted father down with her? Why is the answer to make another super weapon and hand it to some angry, violent young thing dead set on saving the world? And meanwhile, the void inside him would widen to accept another traumatic experience. 

A battle in space against this horrifying man couldn’t ever be anything but traumatic. 

He looked up at the blood red sky. There was panic building, deep in the space-cold corners of his mind, but it wouldn’t come crawling out into the rest of his mind until this was all over and done with, heaped right on top of everything else like some Tower of Trauma. 

Or maybe he’d just die. It would make for a change. 

At least this was different from the vision the Witch had shown him. Steve wasn’t here to die, so even if he ended up on a destroyed, ash-grey planet covered in the remains of a civilization brought to an abrupt, violent end, he’d be there without any of the other Avengers. 

He wasn’t sure if that was an unambiguously good thing. There were parts of him that still called out for Steve, for Bruce, for the people he’d thought he was close to. Those parts of himself didn’t understand betrayal, and could never be taught. He thought it was better, though. If they’d been here, he’d have started to think that vision was an inevitability. 

He broke his gaze away from the empty sky and focused it on his hands. Those were safe. His hands had never been the centerpiece of any of his nightmares, and he needed to leave those thoughts behind him if he was going to focus. 

Nebula wanted a weapon. He didn’t want to build his captor a weapon. Could Nebula’s goal be achieved without a weapon? Her goal was another man’s death, so probably not. Okay, that line of thinking was a dead end. 

Were there any important differences between Tony’s goal and Nebula’s goal? Tony wanted the universe to be safe from destruction via magic space rocks, Nebula wanted the man proposing to do the destroying destroyed. The man in question’s power came from said magic space rocks. 

His brain began to race in circles, tightening and tightening around an idea that had just began to bloom in his mind like a spring flower pushing up through the snow. 

If the magic space rocks were taken away, the man would not have their power. If he didn’t have their power, someone else would have it. If that _someone else_ was Tony and Nebula, then Nebula could destroy that man with them. She could achieve her goal, let all that anger bubbling up out of her skin like lava erupt outwards in one devastating attack. And while she was distracted, Tony would be alone with the other Stones, unsupervised by his kidnapper. 

How, he wondered, would one go about destroying a magic space rock?

* * *

Bucky surveyed the two suits. Friday said they were ready to go, but that kid was so focused on finding her father she hadn’t even considered the fact that they were untested, experimental, and made in a rush.

He knew from bitter experience that untested, experimental rush jobs usually had hiccups of some sort. 

Still, it wasn’t like they really could test it safely. If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t, Bucky was dead and Friday needed to figure out how to get back to Earth in a hurry.

He walked towards the suit on the left. It was the bigger of the two, fabricated with his dimensions in mind. It was also weighed down with compressed water and nutrition-rich fluids instead of weapons. He still had knives and at least one gun on his person from before Friday had hacked his arm. She hadn’t bothered to check him for weapons like a human captor would have. Once they landed on a far-off planet, those would be the only weapons he had. 

Memories from his time as the Winter Soldier flashed like ominous lightning through his mind as he ran his fingers over the handle of one of the knives hidden under his coat. They were probably the only weapons he needed. 

“Hey Friday?” he asked. 

“Yes, Sergeant Barnes?” 

“Can I let Steve know that I’m not dead before we go?”

Her silence was frosty, and he almost snorted. She claimed she wasn’t a little kid, but his little sisters had given him the silent treatment often enough for him to recognize anger so teen-drama-dramatic, words didn’t do it justice. Though perhaps in her case he did deserve it. That day in the bunker still came back to him in his nightmares, twisted and strange as dreams always are, but somehow not twisted enough for comfort.

“Please, Friday,” he said. “I just want him to know. It won’t delay us, or jeopardize the mission. I know he wronged Tony, but let him get his comeuppance in some other, more fitting way. He’s lost enough people suddenly under fantastic and larger-than-life circumstances.”

He didn’t try to plead Steve’s case. The AI likely wouldn’t want to hear it. Sitting here in Stark’s lab, surrounded by the technological marvels he had fathered, _Bucky_ didn’t really want to hear it. Instead, he calmly trained his eyes on the camera in the corner of the room and hoped that she understood the various shades and nuances of mercy and revenge well enough to give him this. If she didn’t, he’d nod and consider it part of his penance, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to. 

At last, a holoscreen popped into existence in front of him. Friday remained silent, but he accepted her mercy, grudging or not. 

Steve’s panicked face appeared on the screen. His hair was sticking out every which way, and his eyes were blown so wide with fear and anger and who knew what else that it was a miracle he could still see at all. Bucky wondered if it was okay to put Steve’s pain towards his penance. It certainly hurt him enough to see it. 

“Bucky!” Steve shouted. His voice reverberated off the lab walls.

“Steve,” he said. “I’ll make this quick- I’m fine. Tony’s gone, he got kidnapped by an alien. I’m going with Friday to try and bring him back. I’m going of my own free will, so don’t be mad at Friday for kidnapping me.”

“But she just flew off with you! I saw your face, you were terrified!”

“I know.”

“She took you prisoner and kept me from saving you!”

“I know.”

“She won’t care if you get hurt, she won’t have your back!”

“I know, Stevie. But after Siberia-” his voice broke, and he jettisoned that sentence before it weighed him down into the depths of his mind. “Tony deserves our help. I mean, he deserves help, and we need to do something after Siberia. Not make-up for it, that’s not what I mean, but balance it out somehow. Do you know understand?”

“No,” Steve’s mouth said, but his eyes said _yes._ “You didn’t do anything wrong, Bucky, none of that was your fault.”

“Well, Friday certainly won’t accept help from you, buddy, so it’s gonna have to be me that goes with her. Besides, I’m the only one who can lend her a hand.” He wiggled his fingers at the screen and smiled. 

“Sergeant Barnes,” Friday said. “The suits are ready to launch whenever you are.” 

Bucky nodded, both at her cameras and at Steve. 

“I gotta go, Stevie, but don’t worry about me. I chose to go.”

He singled to Friday, and the holoscreen dissipated, cutting off Steve’s devastatingly sad face and his righteous sputtering. With a sigh, he turned to the suits. 

“Are you ready for me, Friday?”

“Ready when you are, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Let’s blast off, then.”


	6. Chapter 6

Tony was jolted from his light slumber by a thunderous _ thump _ that threw him from the ground and a spray of sand. 

His heartbeat kicked into overdrive behind the arc reactor, and as always his chest tightened up just enough to be scary. His arms raised reflexively to shield his face from the cascade of sand and to protect his head as he rolled away. Tiny rocks dug into his skin and his left arm throbbed dully when he jarred it on a large stone protruding from the shallow layer of sand. 

He ignored the pain and leaped to his feet to greet the threat. Something had fallen from the sky, perhaps another ship like Nebula’s, perhaps something else-

A good look at the object resting in the tail end of a skid mark in the sand revealed that it wasn’t another ship like Nebula’s, it  _ was _ Nebula’s. The door hissed open and a thin blue figure leaped out like an incensed cat. She stalked toward him, snarling and buzzing. Whatever problem he’d noticed right before she left had definitely gotten worse. 

“Where have you been?” she hissed. “I left you with one job, just one- sit and think about how to make something to defeat Thanos.”

He threw up his hands.

“And I did that!”

“Then why are you all the way over here? I had to use a tracking drone to find you, you weren’t anywhere near where I left you.”

“That tentacle monster thing that you killed was starting to smell, and all these little crustacean things with big claws showed up and started ripping it to pieces, which was interesting enough for me to try and document for science until one of them tried to pinch off a piece of  _ me.  _ All of a sudden I’m being swarmed by alien crabs and they keep coming after I bat them away with the Iron Man gauntlet, so I decided to think while I walked and left.”

Nebula’s mysterious buzzing continued, but her anger seemed to fizzle out like a fire that had exhausted all the oxygen available to it.

“Did you manage to think of anything useful, at least?”

“I’ve got a few ideas, sure, but I’d have to test them out before I can go much further with them.”

“Then you’re in luck,” she said. Her hand sank into her bag and withdrew clutching the Tesseract. She tossed it to him, and he caught it with minimal fumbling. “I was right. Asgard was not as well prepared for an assault on their security forces as they claim to be.”

“Great,” he said. “Now, about that buzzing noise, is that an alien thing? Do you just do that when you’re angry or frustrated? Do other aliens do that? What’s the deal?”

Her face worked and twisted, like the words were there but she needed to wring them of excess information before she spit them out. 

“Thanos trained his stolen daughters to fight brutally, and the punishments for failure were more brutal than any blows we might be able to deliver to each other. It served to make us better, he said, but it also kept us wary of showing mercy. Every time I lost, he replaced a part of my body with a machine. He said I clearly wasn’t good enough, and this would make me better.”

The memory of waking up, out of his mind with pain and uncomprehending of the wires sticking out of his chest flashed through Tony’s mind, and he focused on not throwing up in his mouth.

“So, is one of those machine parts the thing that’s buzzing?”

She nodded jerkily, and tapped the left side of her jaw. 

“He replaced my teeth and jawbone so that they wouldn’t give way beneath the blows of any mortal, and so that I could bite harder.” She started to say something else, then abandoned that thought. “One of the teeth sometimes buzzes when my jaw is too tense. It could stand up to any mortal blow, but there are many things within the Nine Realms that aren’t entirely mortal.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Pain means something different to me than it does to you,” she said instead of answering. 

“Okay, well, would you let me take a look at it? See if I can’t make it stop doing that?”

Her eyes widened so far, the red light of the sun bounced off the whites of her eyes and turned them a faint rosy color. 

“I can handle the pain,” she said, but her eyes were trained on him like a starving person’s on a plate of fancy breads and meats. 

“I’m sure you can,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to?”

The buzzing increased in pitch, then fell back down to what he was beginning to think of as ‘normal’ levels. 

“Alright.”

She turned around and walked back into the spaceship. 

He followed her, and in that moment she transformed from captor to- something else. A dangerous something, perhaps, a wild and vicious something, but in this one way she was like Friday, like Dum-E, like Jarvis. She existed too much in the realm of machines to be fully human- or whatever aliens like her called themselves, he guessed. In that way, she was like him.

He was always willing to take in creatures like that.

* * *

Tony’s first experiment with the Space Stone ended with him accidentally teleporting into the sky and plummeting into the sea. His mouth immediately filled up with blood-red water that left a coppery tang in his mouth. His brain seized up at the taste, then went berserk. Memories of being forced into the barrels of sandy, disgusting water in Afghanistan crashed into memories of blood filling his mouth during a fight and knowing whatever had hit him was strong enough to dent the Iron Man suit like a soda can with him still inside it.

He thrashed and kicked wildly. For a second the pressure of the water over his body increased. He wasn’t moving towards the surface, he was propelling himself deeper. A strong kick flipped him around so he was pointed in the right direction, but doing so forced water up his nose. It burned. 

At last he broke the surface, gasping and spitting water. Still grasping the Tesseract, he began to swim towards the beach. 

The skid marks from Nebula’s space ship was visible to the left and several meters up the beach once he’d rubbed the water from his eyes. But when he reached the beach, he discovered that the rock formed a series of cliffs and ledges beneath the water. He had to find a spot where the stone sloped into the water so he could get out. 

The first spot he found was covered in strange, barnacle-like creatures with hard shells. They were about the size of clams surface-area wise, but rather than follow an irregular edge, their shells were in the shape of a rough, jagged-edged circle. When he tried to dig his fingers into the crevices between them and pull himself up out of the water, the edges of the shells cut his hand. The blood that flowed from the cuts was the same shade as the water he was swimming in. 

Swimming in a bloody ocean was not good for his state of mind, and by the time he found a sloped spot that wasn’t encrusted with the barnacle-creatures his heart rate was sky high. 

His arms trembled violently as he heaved himself out of the water. The red liquid clung to his skin like seawater, and no matter how much he tried to rub and wipe at his oversensitive, pebbling skin, it still looked like he’d stuck his arms inside a carcass. Strangely, the red water didn’t stick to the Tesseract at all. Despite having been submerged along with him, it’s electric blue glow was uninhibited by scarlet residue. 

Ah ha. 

He grabbed the Tesseract and stared closely at where his fingers held it in place. Drops of seawater trickled away from the Tesseract like little magnet chips being repelled from a larger magnet. Triumphantly he ran the Tesseract over his arms like he was ironing out a particularly bumpy piece of the Iron Man gauntlet. Little by little, the the water came off. However, by the time his arms were clean and no longer horrific to look at, the seawater covering the rest of his body began to dry. When he rubbed at the rivulets on his legs, it felt tacky under his touch. Sort of like how dried seawater left courser patches on your skin before the thin layer of salt dissolved away, but stronger. 

There was nothing for it. He was going to have to go back to the escape pod Nebula had left for him and take a bath. 

Seeing the pod again lifted his spirits. She’d claimed having a home base of sorts would keep him from wandering. Perhaps that was  _ a  _ reason, but he thought her tone was a little too concerned for that. Whatever bond he’d forged while fixing her jaw, it wasn’t entirely one way.

The thought made him smile.

* * *

“Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky jerked out of the doze he’d fallen into. With Friday taking care of the steering, he was more or less a weapon just along for the ride inside the suit, and space was so vast that even he couldn’t keep himself entertained, so he’d taken to napping. 

“What is it, Friday?”

“My sensors have picked up a strange energy signature. It corresponds well to several artifacts Boss has dealt with before.”

Bucky’s muscles tensed subconsciously. “Do they match anything specific to the woman who kidnapped him?”

“No,” Friday admitted, “but it’s the only lead that’s showed itself so far.”

“How close is it?” His body coiled as best it could inside a metal, human-shaped prison. He tried not to let himself think about redemption, tried not to make this about himself, but a small part of him still grumbled happily that if this mission went well, he would have done something positive for one of his victims. The need for redemption was like a panting, eager wolf inside him, ready to barrel forward the second an opportunity presented itself. 

“About two hours, if he doesn’t move, though my scans indicate that the energy source was moving when my sensors picked it up.” Friday’s artificial voice just stoked the desire to greater heights. Tony was out there (maybe) and he was moving (maybe) and he was  _ alive _ (there was no proof of that).

He was ready.

* * *

After bathing, Tony tried to recreate the teleportation incident, this time with a bit more control. It was seductively simple. He quickly figured out how to manipulate the energy with his thoughts, and by late afternoon he had figured out how to reliably teleport around the planet and its moons. However, that wasn’t mastery. That was finding a single, reliable path through the sprawling forest and sticking to it. The Tesseract contained so much energy Tony was nearly blinded by it, but even so he could feel it branching off in other, unexplored directions. 

He wasn’t any closer to figuring out how to destroy it. He had plenty of ideas about how to rig it to a machine, how to integrate it with the Iron Man armor, how to use it to warp space in catastrophic, life-ending ways, but no idea how to destroy the stone itself. Thoughts of turning that incredible energy inward sometimes drifted through his head, but he discarded those ideas like he discarded the designs for weapons. The Tesseract was made to contain all that energy. Rerouting it wouldn’t solve anything. 

Almost more to pass the time than anything, he continued to practice teleporting further and further. Maybe if he could figure out where he was in the universe, he could teleport back to Earth, or figure out where Nebula went.

Nebula had set out more than a day ago to steal the Reality Stone, and Tony was starting to get worried. He had no real time frame for how long it was supposed to take to steal a Stone, but she had only been gone for about a day when she went to steal the Tesseract from Asgard. Visions of her being caught and dragged away by prison guards, or of her running into Thanos himself, chased each other through his mind until he was dizzy with worry.

When the bloody sun finally set for the second time since she’d left, he’d had enough. Maybe she was in danger, maybe she wasn’t. Either way, he had no new leads on how to destroy the stones and still wasn’t ready to resort to building weapons. He needed to do something. 

Night on this planet was a dark purple, lit by a three lavender moons that sat low in the sky. The Tesseract glowed brightly against the darkness. Tony sat in the sand, trying not to remember the last time he was stranded in the middle of nowhere at night with nothing but sand beneath his feet, and explored the Tesseract’s energy fields. 

They seemed to expand forever into the vast expanse of space. He had to dig his nails into the sand to ground himself, or else the energy would have teleported him away to some strange other place. No matter how far he pursued, no matter how thin the thread he followed, none of them ever seemed to have an endpoint. He gave one thread an experimental tug. It moved easily like he was guiding a stray thread of a spider’s web with his finger. Unfortunately, several other strands around it moved as well. They moved together like a horribly tangled strand of hair, even when he tried to move them in opposite directions. When that failed, he mentally grabbed hold of one of the thinner ones and tried to break it. It bent and curved, but he couldn’t snap it, or even fray it a little. He frowned, and tossed the Tesseract into the sand. Immediately the vast webs of energy disappeared. 

He sighed and picked it up again. If screwing with the Tesseract’s energy didn’t work, he simply had to try something else. 

A thought struck him. Loki used the Tesseract back when the Avengers first assembled to move an army through space, but he hadn’t teleported them. He’d opened a portal.

Tony wasn’t sure how opening a portal would make it easier to destroy the Tesseract, but he didn’t have any other leads. Maybe if he could figure out how to make one of those portals, he could bring backup from Earth. War Machine would certainly be of use in a fight, and there was nothing like sitting alone under unfamiliar stars to make him miss his oldest friend. 

How to go about it though? Teleporting was rather simple- he just grabbed a strand of energy and let it carry him to another place. Would portal-making be similarly simple? Could he just find a place where he wanted to go, and pull it toward him?

He grabbed the Tesseract and thought back to the feeling of electrical impulses flowing through Nebula’s jaw, and felt for a thread of energy that felt similar. When he found it, he seized it and pulled it toward him as hard as he could. 

The Tesseract surged in his hands, and a hole crackled open in the air in front of him. The portal grew until it was big enough to drive Nebula’s spaceship through. On the other side, Nebula was running, blades flicked open and screaming. Flashes of light burst behind her, and the sky was full of falling, smoking spaceships. 

In Nebula’s path stood a giant purple man with a large golden gauntlet. 


End file.
